Called From Darkness

I was reading a devotional by Philip Gulley this morning. (He's a Quaker author from the Midwest, who has written a delightful series of novels, as well as non-fiction.) He spoke about the verse in Isaiah 9:2. In The Message this reads "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. For those who lived in a land of deep shadows - light! Sunbursts of light!"

Now as I've said many times, one of my pet peeves is equating darkness with evil and light with goodness, since all life begins in darkness. However, he referred to this passage as one that calls us to a journey, which gave me a different perspective.

Yes, growth begins in the dark. We must have dark to have life. But (with the notable exceptions of the fungi, and such) we also need light. Without light, we do not grow very far. Like so many truths, this is not an either/or, but a both/and. We need both. And that is what we must remember. We need both. Dark is not bad. It's only a necessary condition for growth. The Solstice represents both - the change from light to dark, or from dark to light. So will our lives be.

My most recent own personal solstice was when my best friend died of cancer. The event threw my life into chaos, so I didn't really know how to put it back together again. Then I moved to Klamath Falls, which has been my cocoon. Out of that cocoon and darkness, has been born a new person, with new hopes and dreams - a part of myself which would not have seen the light of day without the darkness in which it was born.

So let us not be afraid of the dark, but learn to welcome it, and look to see what new life it seeks to raise in us. And let us also welcome the light, which completes the growth begun in the dark.

Magi and Shepherds

I am finding myself strangely moved by the Christmas story this year. Perhaps because I am participating in the Advent part of the worship service at church, I feel especially close to the story. I’ve been thinking a lot about what the various actors in the drama represent. Today is the Sunday of the Magi, so I’ll talk about them briefly.

The Magi have always struck me as the most likely to be true part of the Christmas story. Their whole depiction seems to be to be that of astrologers described by those who don’t have a clue how astrology really works. I have no basis for this belief – I’ve never heard anyone else say it, but I like the thought anyway.

Of course in Matthew’s gospel, the Magi represent us, the non-Jews. Because we call them kings, they represent gifts from those in authority to someone they would have considered an equal, or as Matthew pictures them someone they consider more than an equal.

The story also seems to me to indicate that these men from a differing religious tradition understand what is happening when the Jews do not. They and the shepherds both indict the rulers and even the everyday respectable folks who never noticed a thing, or were actively hostile. I like the Magi. They add majesty and mystery to the story. I like the shepherds too, the slightly less than respectable receivers of the angels’ song, who were so eager to go see the reality of the message of they had received.

True or not – likely not, alas – they add a wonderful dimension to the story. Jesus came into the world in an unusual way, welcomed by unusual folks. Everyone would have been welcome, but only the foreigners and the blue-collar workers came. May I now, in the present, have open eyes and an open heart to welcome this child who is the basis of my Christian tradition.

Judgment or Love?

In one of the BBC's thoughts for the day this week, the Rev. Joel Edwards stated, "justice is the bedrock of the Christian faith." He wasn't talking about distributive justice - the justice that makes sure that the powerless are treated fairly by those in power. He was talking in the context of a courtroom setting, what is sometimes called retributive justice.

My first thought was that he was wrong - love is the bedrock of the Christian faith. Yet as I thought about the program afterwards, I realized that all too often he is right. For many Christians justice in the form of judgment is the bedrock of their faith. This, of course, is what Pelagius pointed out as the danger in the doctrine of original sin that his contemporary Augustine was postulating towards the end of the fourth century. It seems to me that for many Christians, the whole idea of their faith is for them to do well enough in the Final Judgment to get into heaven, rather than being chucked into hell. This is also, the whole point of the Left Behind series.

I find myself in Pelagius' camp. I think the doctrine of original sin - the doctrine that leads to judgment being the bedrock of the Christian faith - has not served us well. I prefer the Celtic Christianity before the Synod of Whitby forced Roman Catholicism on the Irish. Their belief was that we are all attached to the divine and no matter what we do, we can never totally eradicate that spark.

For me, the bedrock of the Christian faith is love - the love of God as taught by Jesus. When asked what the greatest of the commandments was, he answered, and I'm paraphrasing, love God, love others. Indeed, we are even to love our enemies, that is, see them as fellow human beings and children of God, and treat them accordingly.

Christmas Cookies

I’ve spent the last two days finishing my Christmas baking (well, almost!) and getting cookies ready for the neighbors. I live in an over 55 mobile park, and most of the residents are widows and so don’t do much baking. Getting Christmas cookies gives them something not only to enjoy, but to share with others who stop by for the holidays.

This has been a tradition for me ever since I lived here (this is my 6^th Christmas). I have learned to enjoy baking, and love sharing my goodies with others. Since I have little money, this is a good way for me to give.

This cookie giveaway has come to mean a lot to me. For the first time in years, I live in something approaching the neighborhood where I grew up, where everybody knows everybody else, and we all help each other. It’s a very special place for me, and I enjoy having the chance to give back. It’s the one time of the year when generosity comes naturally to me.

I’ve also crocheted about 30 tiny little hat ornaments to pass out to friends along with their Christmas cards. What fun!

This is part of my spirituality – the giving of simple gifts to friends and neighbors. I’m grateful for Christmas time when that becomes a priority.

Handel's Messiah

Oh, wow! I just got back from a live performance of the first part of Handel's Messiah. What could be more inspiring than that great piece of music at any time of year, but particularly in December with the first real snow on the ground?

For my little city of Klamath Falls, it was an amazing production. A couple of the soloists could be called impressive, and the chorus had obviously practiced for hours. They were wonderful.

But the real star of it of course is Handel's magnificent music that lifts you up to the skies. From the opening "Comfort ye my people" until the final piece of the first part, "His yoke is easy…" it was splendid. And of courses they added the Hallelujah chorus on the end.

Some things hit me in a new way this year. The singing about leveling mountains and lifting up valleys so the way is flat - I'm asking myself if that is really a good thing. My life at least seems more defined by the highs and lows. Do I really want it all evened out? I would miss those mountain top experiences.

And of course, it covers one of my pet peeves at the moment - the equating of darkness with badness or evil. Like we need both highs and lows, we need both darkness and light. To be forced to live in constant darkness would be bad; to be forced to live in constant light would be too. Growth begins in the dark, continues in the light, and eventually returns to the dark.

But all in all, it was a glorious evening, and I am so glad I went.

Sing Hallelujah

Sing Hallelujah was a nationwide project in England on December 5, the 250th anniversary of Handel's death. People all over Britain joined together to sing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah. The Rev. Rob Marshall, an Anglican priest talked about it for the BBC's Thought for the Day on that day.

What struck me during his little talk, was that he called group singing the great equalizer. When people sing, class, race, and gender melt away for a moment. I got to thinking about the idea, and remembered Reginald Owen's Christmas Carol that I watched a few days ago. In it, after Scrooge is redeemed, he goes to church. There he, his nephew Fred, Fred's fiancée, Bob Crachet, and his son Tim are all singing the hymn together. Three levels of society at that time, all joining in together equally.

I thought of the singing of the National Anthem before athletic events. Do people get to sing that anymore, or it is always someone professional? I can remember doing it at baseball games when I was a child.

There is that scene in Casablanca, where the woman whose name I can't remember begins "La Marseillaise" and how it affects the different people in the café - the French singing it proudly, the Germans looking irritated. From about the same time is a scene from Sound of Music where Captain von Trapp sings "Edelweiss" and invites the audience to join in, with the German occupiers sitting right there. It's a powerful scene.

And who could forget the singing that was so much a part of the Civil Rights movement? Singing is an equalizer. It is also a powerful way to invoke deep emotions. As I join my voice with others the carols of this season, I am going to be remembering the power of song.

Mythology

I've been thinking about mythology and how it defines a race - or at least the group that believes in it. I'm not an expert in any wide-ranging sense, but want to touch on a few of the ones I do know.

At the beginning of written history, we have the Babylonian myth of the sky god Marduk defeating the earth goddess Tiamat. This myth was retold through many cultures of that time and has a great influence on people's thought in so many ways: the victory of the sky gods, the fact that divine help comes from the outside and wears a male face, the belief that victory comes through force, and so on. We see a version of the myth, changed by the lens of a different culture in the Bible's Garden of Eden story - though the story itself has a different focus. Walter Wink in The Powers That Be argues that this Babylonian myth underlies our whole American frame of thought today, with our heroes being those who overcome the bad guys by force - like Superman.

Moving forward in time we have the story of the Exodus from Egypt - a slave people freed because their god defeated the Egyptian gods. Though modern archeology throws doubt on the historicity of the story, it underlies and indeed underpins Jewish identity. Being God's chosen people through the promise made to Abraham, and the rescue from Egypt defines a people.

Moving farther forward, we have the Christmas story. Though Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan point out in The First Christmas that this was fashioned to be a Christian version of the myths created around the birth of Caesar Augustus, it has a profound meaning for Christians, many (most?) of whom believe it is a factual story. The idea of the sky god becoming human to save his people, because they are incapable of saving themselves, is the Christian version of the Exodus story. The belief that the founder of the tradition was God himself is incredibly powerful, and has led to both the best and worst in Christian history.

There are so many more - the Roman belief that their empire was founded by a man raised by a wolf, the Greeks praising Odysseus, who won over others by cleverness, the trickster myths of Native American cultures, our American myth of manifest destiny and the rugged individualist - we all have our myths to look back on and we respond to the culture they have created - whether that's absorbing it without thought, or rejecting it.

I think our part as mature adults is to recognize our myths and understand the attitudes they have taught us, so that we can intelligibly accept the parts that are helpful and reject those parts that are not.

It's good to have wonder at Christmas time - people have been celebrating Yule for longer than anyone can count - but not to let our own mythology blind us to the wider world. Let's take the good parts of our stories. For me that means that Jesus reached out to all in need, that he teaches us to live with compassion, to search for truth, to respect even our enemies as human beings, to live without fear, and not to make ourselves insular. Let us once again remember that facts and truth are not synonymous and look past the particular stories to the meaning beneath.

Let's keep the wonder of this time of year and lose the pettiness and greed and selfishness and parochialism. Let's move past our tribal identities and into a wider world of the acceptance that we are all brothers and sisters, each with our unique stories and traditions, but family underneath it all.

Blessed are the conservative in Bible translation

Wow, I'm amazed. A friend pointed me to Blessed are the conservative in Bible translation, an article on MSNBC.com. Christian Conservatives feel all the versions of the Bible have been co-opted by Liberals. So they are going to do their own translation. And since they believe all Bible scholars are notoriously liberal, they are going to do a wiki project, with everyone (except scholars and other liberals, I guess) saying what they think a passage means. The driving force behind this is Andy Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia.com.

One of the things Schlafly complains about is that modern translators translate the word anthropos as person instead of man. Of course person or human being is actually more accurate. Greek has a word for man as opposed to woman. It is andros (root, aner). Anthropos refers to the human race.

I find this both a little scary and a lot sad, and I wonder what it's like to live so far to the right that everything else looks left. We all have our biases, of course. When I read virtually any translation f the Bible, I see the hand of orthodoxy choosing the safe English word, rather than anything more controversial.

Speaking of orthodoxy, I don't suppose most conservatives have any idea why certain things are considered orthodox and others not. I'm sure they are unaware that for its first three centuries Christianity was in a fluid state. People had widely differing views of what it was, and which books and letters were canonical. And how the church leadership should be organized. If Constantine hadn't needed the Roman bishops on his side, a different kind of Christianity might have been declared orthodox, and today we might be condemning those who declare Jesus to be God, for example.

This reminds me of people who declare that the media have a liberal bias. They don't seem to realize that the media express the view of the owners, who are more than likely to be rich white men with a vested interest in keeping the world safe for their kind. Similarly, the doctrines that won out in Christianity had less to do with true theology and more to do with establishing the church's authority and power.

I guess what bothers me most is that those behind the scenes with a very particular agenda are manipulating regular folks. I'm sure this is as true on the left as it is on the right, but right now it is so easy to see that many on the conservative side are frightened. They're convinced their way of life is being attacked, and are in a circle-the-wagons mode. I sympathize with them as much as I blame the behind the scenes people who are manipulating those fears. Too bad we can't all step out from our strongholds and really listen to each other. Then we might be able to lose our paranoia and things like this wiki conservative Bible might never even come up.

Dear John...

There was a short article in the December 1 Christian Century by William H. Willimon called "Dear John," which is a fictitious rejection letter for the Gospel of John. Unfortunately, it's not available on the Web, so I can't point anyone to it. It is tongue-in-cheek, and quite amusing. When I read it, I thought if I wrote this, it would have a very different flavor. So here's mine.

To: John

From: Karen Oberst, editor

Re: Your submission

Although are not rejecting your gospel out of hand, we feel there needs to be some work done before we include it in our larger anthology tentatively entitled The New Testament.

First, before we can consider adding your gospel beside the gospels already written by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we need you to add at or near the beginning, a statement that this is not written by someone who actually witnessed the events, but is instead the views held by the leadership of the church in and around Rome now at the turn of the century. We think it will be confusing for people if they were to assume what you have written was actually said by Jesus, instead of words put in his mouth by the church hierarchy.

We like some of your stories, such as the Woman at the Well, and Blind Bartimaeus, but please remove the story of Nicodemus in the third chapter. We feel this could cause untold trouble down the road, with the statement "born from above." (We believe our publication will be in print for many years.)

Please do also indicate that you are not presenting Jesus' life and ministry in anything like chronological order. Readers could be confused by the fact that you put the cleansing of the temple so early in his ministry, for example.

Lastly, while we will allow it to remain in, we do feel that taking the word logos, which has been used to refer to Wisdom, the female part of God, and instead using it to refer to Jesus is rude, but does fit in with the patriarchal views currently held by the Roman church hierarchy.

Likewise, all the places you have Jesus referring to himself in divine terms, we do understand are currently the views of the church in Rome. We feel you are muddying the waters by inserting those comments, but as it is beginning to look likely that the Roman version of Christianity will prevail over all the other types, I don't see how we can insist you remove them, though we would like to go on record as believing it would be best.

We look forward to receiving your corrected manuscript at your earliest convenience.

Adults in the Faith?

Infantilizing Christianity - I hate it. I heard it again recently. "Picture yourself riding on God's shoulders. Picture yourself cradling in Jesus' arms" - since when did remaining babies in faith become something to celebrate?

Okay, I know - sometimes we need that comfort. When we are sick, when we face some terrible trouble for ourselves or our loved ones, when tragedy strikes, yes, we need comfort. But in the normal run of daily life, is it healthy to think of ourselves as babies who never grow up?

I've read Matthew 18:3 too: "Except ye be converted, and become as little children (the Greek often means infants), ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." (KJV). Let me say a couple of things about this passage. First, we may need to become little children to enter the Kingdom, but the verse says nothing about remaining infants. Secondly, I like the way the Buddhists put it better - we need a beginner's mind. It refers to coming to something new with no preconceived notions, being open to what this new thing might teach us. As is often quoted: In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.

Think like a parent for a moment. Babies are loved and held, and tiny children ride on Dad's shoulders, but would any parent, no matter how much he or she loves the little one, wish it to remain tiny and dependent forever? Don't we rather rejoice with each new accomplishment? Isn't a parent's wish for their child to grow into a fully functioning, happy adult?

One of the rites of passage of my childhood was getting a beautiful blue Schwinn two-wheeler when I was six years old. For a time it had training wheels, then they came off, and my Dad ran beside me as I tried out the new big kid bike. I had no fear, because I knew he was hanging on. And so he did at first. But after a few minutes I looked back, and he was standing at the side of the road, proudly watching as I rode the bike all by myself. Would he have been as proud of me if I instead had clung to him, not wanting to move up to this new experience; not wanting to grow? I don't think so.

Another rite of passage was when I was too big to be carried inside from the car. This was a sad thing at the time, but who would expect a teenager, or mature adult to be carried by a parent?

Do we think God is different? Do we honor God by clinging to God's robe or whining to be picked up and held? Don't we rather make God proud of us by growing and learning - by becoming adult in our faith?

I spent much of the early part of this year going, "I am not a sheep." This is a similar image - we as sheep needing to be taken care of by the shepherd, being led and protected. Again, there are times when we need this, but the trouble with this image for me is that a sheep can never move on - never be more than a sheep. No matter how old a sheep gets, it still needs to be taken care of by the shepherd. I think we need to move beyond that image to that of the eagle flying free. So I declared over and over "I am not a sheep!" And then one day I found myself looking back at the sheepfold from the outside, with the shepherd leaning over the gate, smiling encouragement for me to go on. I was paralyzed - not a sheep, not yet an eagle - but then, ahead of me, I saw mountain peaks labeled with all the amazing things I could become, and I started forward joyfully, leaving the sheepfold behind. Am I an eagle now? I like to think I am earning my wings.

In my Quaker tradition, we used to have what were called "weighty Friends," that is, those folks who had experience walking with God, and could serve as mentors to the younger members of the meeting. Their wisdom was sought and appreciated. I'm not saying anyone ever arrives, or has no more to learn, but shouldn't we be striving to grow into adults in our faith?

Rather than being carried, I like the image of walking beside God, or even having God as a cheerleader as I move on in my journey to become my true self and to share myself with others. I think it's time to lose these unhelpful images and grow up. Shall we agree to become adults?